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The Winter Helen Dropped By
Book by KINSELLA, W.P.
186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
W.P. Kinsella
56 books233 followersWilliam Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC was a Canadian novelist and short story writer. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues.
William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.
As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.
Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. He travelled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1991, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.
Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. A short story by Kinsella, Lieberman in Love, was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.
Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in a long hiatus in his fiction-writing career until the publication of the novel, Butterfly Winter. He is a noted tournament Scrabble player, becoming more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. Near the end of his life he lived in Yale, British Columbia with his fourth wife, Barbara (d. 2012), and occasionally wrote articles for various newspapers.
In the year 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia.
W.P. Kinsella elected to die on September 16, 2016 with the assistance of a physician.
William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.
As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.
Though he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing there in 1974. He travelled down to Iowa and earned a Master of Fine Arts in English degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1991, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.
Kinsella's most famous work is Shoeless Joe, upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. A short story by Kinsella, Lieberman in Love, was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film – the Oscar win came as a surprise to the author, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He had not been listed in the film's credits, and was not acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech – a full-page advertisement was later placed in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on a First Nations reserve were the basis for the movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considers very poor quality. The collection Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.
Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Kinsella suffered a car accident in 1997 which resulted in a long hiatus in his fiction-writing career until the publication of the novel, Butterfly Winter. He is a noted tournament Scrabble player, becoming more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. Near the end of his life he lived in Yale, British Columbia with his fourth wife, Barbara (d. 2012), and occasionally wrote articles for various newspapers.
In the year 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia.
W.P. Kinsella elected to die on September 16, 2016 with the assistance of a physician.
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October 22, 2016My paperback copies of W.P. Kinsella's short story collections look conspicuous in my library. They are not pristine like their neighbors. They have been read and re-read, lent to friends, transported from office to office when I still worked and needed their comforts; they look used. Three stories, in particular, continue to resonate: 'The Bottle Queen', 'How I Got My Nickname', and 'Dance Me Outside'.
He wrote about Canadian Indians and Baseball, although the two topics stayed separate in his books. He wrote in a style that's probably some kind of genre, but I never bothered with such titles. It's just a style that has always sounded familiar to me. Ernest Hebert, Jim Harrison and T.R. Pearson sound similar, if that helps.
Kinsella will always be best known for writing the book upon which the movie 'Field of Dreams' is based. But I like him for so much more.
I ordered this book, one of the few of his I hadn't read, the day I heard he died.
Kinsella wrote this'un in 1995, two years before he suffered a serious head injury when he was struck by a car. He gave up writing, preferring to play Scrabble on the internet. It took him thirteen years to regain the creative impulse to write; and he did. I'll get there too. (His hiatus from writing, by the way, caused a 'remaindering' of his books because of the IRS treatment of warehoused books. But that is another story.)
He got sick, but kept it kind of quiet. He died September 16, 2016 in British Columbia. His death was physician-assisted, a practice legal in Canada. Go the distance, Bill.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
The Winter Helen Dropped By references baseball and Indians but is not really about either subject.* It's about the cold in Alberta. And it's a young boy, our narrator, observing the hardscrabble characters that live miles apart from each other and yet need each other very much. At its core, it's a feel-good story about the boy's parents.
Mama had wheat-golden hair and eyes that went from cornflower blue to bachelor button blue, about five shades darker, if she was cross with me or Daddy. She was light-skinned with just a hint of freckle here and there, and there wasn't enough of her to fan yourself with in humid weather, Daddy said.
Mama could say things to just the two of them like, "If the Donner Party had been given that meal . . . they'd still have eaten each other, it was that bad."
Daddy, as a warm-up to 'the talk' with his son, reveals:
I don't know if you know the difference, Jamie, but there's poor, and there's sorrowful, and there's shiftless, and unfortunately my family falls in the latter two categories. . . . As soon as I caught sight of your mama I knew I wanted her to think of me as being important, even if I was an illiterate baseball-playing gandy dancer, who happened to be sent out to the prairies of South Dakota to put her railroad track back on track.
It is Daddy who the menfolk go to for advice. Which, unfailingly, is the right thing to do.
Daddy is someone I could vote for. Yes, he is most definitely someone I could vote for.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
R.I.P.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
*"Every story," Daddy said, "is about sex or death, or sometimes both."
"What about your baseball stories?" said I, thinking myself more than passing clever.
"You know what the word phallic means?" my daddy asked.
He wrote about Canadian Indians and Baseball, although the two topics stayed separate in his books. He wrote in a style that's probably some kind of genre, but I never bothered with such titles. It's just a style that has always sounded familiar to me. Ernest Hebert, Jim Harrison and T.R. Pearson sound similar, if that helps.
Kinsella will always be best known for writing the book upon which the movie 'Field of Dreams' is based. But I like him for so much more.
I ordered this book, one of the few of his I hadn't read, the day I heard he died.
Kinsella wrote this'un in 1995, two years before he suffered a serious head injury when he was struck by a car. He gave up writing, preferring to play Scrabble on the internet. It took him thirteen years to regain the creative impulse to write; and he did. I'll get there too. (His hiatus from writing, by the way, caused a 'remaindering' of his books because of the IRS treatment of warehoused books. But that is another story.)
He got sick, but kept it kind of quiet. He died September 16, 2016 in British Columbia. His death was physician-assisted, a practice legal in Canada. Go the distance, Bill.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
The Winter Helen Dropped By references baseball and Indians but is not really about either subject.* It's about the cold in Alberta. And it's a young boy, our narrator, observing the hardscrabble characters that live miles apart from each other and yet need each other very much. At its core, it's a feel-good story about the boy's parents.
Mama had wheat-golden hair and eyes that went from cornflower blue to bachelor button blue, about five shades darker, if she was cross with me or Daddy. She was light-skinned with just a hint of freckle here and there, and there wasn't enough of her to fan yourself with in humid weather, Daddy said.
Mama could say things to just the two of them like, "If the Donner Party had been given that meal . . . they'd still have eaten each other, it was that bad."
Daddy, as a warm-up to 'the talk' with his son, reveals:
I don't know if you know the difference, Jamie, but there's poor, and there's sorrowful, and there's shiftless, and unfortunately my family falls in the latter two categories. . . . As soon as I caught sight of your mama I knew I wanted her to think of me as being important, even if I was an illiterate baseball-playing gandy dancer, who happened to be sent out to the prairies of South Dakota to put her railroad track back on track.
It is Daddy who the menfolk go to for advice. Which, unfailingly, is the right thing to do.
Daddy is someone I could vote for. Yes, he is most definitely someone I could vote for.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
R.I.P.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
*"Every story," Daddy said, "is about sex or death, or sometimes both."
"What about your baseball stories?" said I, thinking myself more than passing clever.
"You know what the word phallic means?" my daddy asked.
May 13, 2019
This book is a follow-up to Kinsella's book, Box Socials. It involves the same small towns in Alberta, the same residents and their day-to-day adventures, all narrated by a young Jamie O'Day. The author does a good job of portraying the small town culture and the observations of a 12 year old.
April 18, 2012
Canadian author... not so great! Sorry!
March 4, 2024
Fun quick read humorously depicts life in a remote Canadian town from the first person POV of a pre-fifth grade boy looking back. The title format is used again and again in things like, "The Summer White Chaps Murdered His Wife and The Summer Jamie Damned Near Drowned. These phrases are not chapter headings...just interspersed in the story.
The intentional use of excessive repetition of MANY LONG phrases/description lent humor until it got to be a bit much...but overall very enjoyable.
Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe which became Field of Dreams.
(**The story of Kinsella's life is very interesting - look it up)
The intentional use of excessive repetition of MANY LONG phrases/description lent humor until it got to be a bit much...but overall very enjoyable.
Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe which became Field of Dreams.
(**The story of Kinsella's life is very interesting - look it up)
June 4, 2021
W.P. Kinsella’s story is told from the child Jamie O’Day’s perspective. Each character and location is repeated in exactly the same words, much like a child’s story book. The timeline is centred around the winter that a mysterious stranger, a teen native girl, arrives at the family home during a blizzard. Another time is the summer, or spring as he corrects, in which he nearly drowns. The locals (and his dog, the cowardly Benito Mussolini) of the fictional Six Towns Area of Alberta, Canada are splendidly drawn out for the reader. I loved it.
May 1, 2024
I have read a lot of Kinsella over the years and have liked most of what I have read. I suppose this qualifies as a novel, although it reads like a collection of short stories connected by time, place, and characters. It was enjoyable but it's no Shoeless Joe.
January 31, 2018
It is always a pleasure to read a Kinsella book. I thought I had read them all about 25 years ago and happened on this.
May 29, 2022
I loved the story and the characters but wasn't thrilled with Mr. Kinsella style. I'll have to read another of his books.
May 28, 2025
Very like a vintage Alice Munro, but a bit more rustic - and Nordic - a quiet, beautiful, funny and satirical look at rural life in the years around the Great Depression.
October 23, 2016
poignant while hilarious - hard to do! I have many favorite quotes, but then why spoil it for others? I did read this work due to a review here on Goodreads. I was well rewarded. Oh for the good old days where family stories were the entertainment.
"The winter Helen dropped by, which was followed by the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though that summer was actually a spring, was preceded by the summer my daddy took on the case of Lousy Louise Kortgaard versus the Province of Alberta."
The narrator Jamie tackles each of these and more with detail, but continues to refer to all the events by their names. If that appeals, there is plenty to laugh at in these pages describing life in rural Edmonton during the 1940s. I must say, after a multitude of references, one wonders when we are going to finally hear the tale of "the summer Jamie damn near drowned" but then...at 86% of the way through the book, the story unfolds. Jamie loves Spring and he takes his boats to the Jamie O'Day Creek to launch and watch but one gets caught in the weeds along the bank. He stretched to reach the boat and fell in. His clothes weighed him down but he was soon pulled into the current "and swept away downstream toward Purgatory Lake, the Pembina River, and possibly Hudson Bay." As he was having end-of-life thoughts he closed his eyes and then when he opened them "there was a familiar face staring down at me." It was Helen, the Indian woman Jamie's family had let into their house and saved from 60-below weather. To learn more about her you will want to read the book.
"The winter Helen dropped by, which was followed by the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though that summer was actually a spring, was preceded by the summer my daddy took on the case of Lousy Louise Kortgaard versus the Province of Alberta."
The narrator Jamie tackles each of these and more with detail, but continues to refer to all the events by their names. If that appeals, there is plenty to laugh at in these pages describing life in rural Edmonton during the 1940s. I must say, after a multitude of references, one wonders when we are going to finally hear the tale of "the summer Jamie damn near drowned" but then...at 86% of the way through the book, the story unfolds. Jamie loves Spring and he takes his boats to the Jamie O'Day Creek to launch and watch but one gets caught in the weeds along the bank. He stretched to reach the boat and fell in. His clothes weighed him down but he was soon pulled into the current "and swept away downstream toward Purgatory Lake, the Pembina River, and possibly Hudson Bay." As he was having end-of-life thoughts he closed his eyes and then when he opened them "there was a familiar face staring down at me." It was Helen, the Indian woman Jamie's family had let into their house and saved from 60-below weather. To learn more about her you will want to read the book.
January 16, 2011
WP Kinsella is a good writer. He tells it the way it is. I read a few about this author, even tough "The Fields of Dream" went on to be a motion picture with actor Kevin Costner, "The Winter Helen Dropped By" is still my favorite.
March 19, 2011
homey and quiet yet not boring or anything:)
June 28, 2012
Have had this one for a loong time, and still can go back and find new things. Worth reading, if only for the main character's way of naming things.
August 6, 2014
Kinsella has an endearing style. Read 'Box Social' years ago, and having found this at a thrift store, was more than pleased to revisit the area and era of the early book.
May 3, 2015
Enjoyed the read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews